Was America Just Hit With a Huge DDOS Attack?

There are always groups around the world looking to push the limits of online security systems. Unfortunately, in many cases, some of these organizations are government backed allowing them to effectively make it a full-time 24/7 occupation. It seems, however, that overnight America may have been subjected to one of its most significant and concerted DDOS attacks in recent years as various online information is showing a huge spike in attempts to effective shutdown various servers across the country. With, we should add, more than a little apparent success!

America Sees Huge DDOS Attack Spike?

Seemingly starting at about 11pm yesterday (BST) reports started growing that a number of highly popular online services started experience issues en masse. Following information taken from ‘DownDetector‘ this included many popular internet providers as well as social media platforms.

Fast-forwarding to the morning, while it clearly wasn’t consistent for everyone, it’s pretty clear that (all at around the same time) a huge number of online services experienced a ‘spike’ in outages. In other words, if this was a DDOS attack, it seems to have had some effect before it was resolved.

What Do We Think?

Based on the consistency of the outages, while not an absolute guarantee, it does appear that this was indeed a huge and concerted attack placed on American based servers. While no individual group has yet claimed responsibility for this, if you were having problems accessing your favorite website last night, this was probably why.

The only good news is that while DDOS attacks can be effective in the short term, most servers these days have plenty of security to detect and prevent them from ever being too successful.

Edit – We are starting to hear the suggestion that this may NOT have been a DDOS attack. Rather T-Mobile decided to do some server tweaks last night that ended up going really badly! This did, however, create specific problems with certain websites that caused erroneous ‘downtime’ errors to be logged by users. Less dramatic, but this certainly seems like a more probable explanation.

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!